Stormed Fortress: Fifth Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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the chokehold of despair. Hope danced, forged into melody that rejected insidious dissolution. Where abased torment reigned, beauty unfurled the adamant fire of will.
Lifted free, Sulfin Evend wept without sound, while the cry of the other man’s heart refigured itself in the soaring majesty of music. Fingers wrought light out of silver-wound strings and invoked exaltation through Ath’s gift of unvanquished freedom.
Peace returned. What darkness remained had been cleansed of all stain, reduced to mere shade cast by moonbeams. The master musician laid down his last line. Exquisite, his closing chord faded. The quietude, after, still gleamed with raised power, even when he damped off his strings.
Left with a fragile, cathartic scar to offset an experience of lacerating separation, Sulfin Evend heard the sigh of stirred air as the superb instrument was set aside. A whisper of fabric described movement. Senses torn raw caught the near-soundless step that approached. Through drug haze and dull sickness, the shock of encounter carried an unbearable clarity: the looming fierce presence of the sorcerer took pause, brought short by belated discovery. An explorative touch traced the mantle that masked Sulfin Evend’s prostrate shoulder.
‘Dharkaron Avenge!’ swore the Spinner of Darkness, sharpened to startled annoyance. ‘A bound prisoner? What uncivil trick left you here?’
The robe draped over Sulfin Evend’s gagged form was grasped, then snapped away.
Since nightfall left the cave dark as pitch, the initiate mind would use mage-sense: the Master of Shadow surveyed what lay at his feet. Wide open still, sensitized by his music, he exclaimed in shocked anguish, ‘Ath’s mercy forgive! You’re the same one who maimed Jieret!’
Talented Sight and narcotic trance brought the past to collide with the present: still snagged into unwitting rapport, Sulfin Evend was hurled back into grisly recall, as a red-haired victim’s hot blood splashed from the vengeful cut of his dagger.
He curled on his side, retching, while his enemy recoiled above him.
Barraged, caught stripped of defences as well, Arithon sucked a fast breath. He owned the strength of training to wrestle his unleashed emotion, but not the gush of a far-sighted talent, run irretrievably wild: for he was not yet healed. The traumatic assault on him by dark necromancy still faulted his natural barriers. The breach entangled his crown gift of empathy with flaring aggression and rage.
No less volatile, and just as viciously mirrored: he matched an antagonist also unstrung by deranging hallucination.
Equanimity shattered, Arithon gasped, staggered by the blazing ferocity that reached for instinctive revenge. Brute discipline triumphed. He did not strike to kill. The curbed stress discharged into his auric field and released as a burst of gold light.
But the stripping exposure laid his face bare to the force of his unassuaged grief.
Then darkness resettled. Sulfin Evend braced for a knife in the ribs, or a fist, as such a fury of towering, unexpressed pain triggered reflexive violence.
No mangling blow fell. The stilled, charcoal air gave nothing back. Not a sound, or a breeze, or a footstep. Unable to fight, unable to speak, unable to vent through his helplessness, Sulfin Evend shut his eyes. Strapped hand and foot, teeth clamped against nausea, he feared to breathe lest the tension should break him in pieces.
The touch, lightly trembling, grasped his shoulder again, to a ragged line spoken in Paravian. Met by a flinch, the Teir’s’Ffalenn cursed. Then he said, still distressed, ‘Relax. I wasn’t expecting the Alliance Commander at Arms as my afternoon’s idle company.’ A deeply drawn breath, and his composure steadied. ‘Despite what you’ve heard about my reputation, I’m truly not planning to murder you.’
But of course, Sulfin Evend held no grounds for trust. A confirmed enemy must understand that. Trussed as he was, he could do little but heave and try not to choke on the gag left by the barbaric dartmen.
There came, moments later, the soft hiss of flame: Arithon had rekindled the coal-pot. ‘Drugged and held speechless? No wonder you fear. The flashback similarity to your mishandling of Earl Jieret must sweat you with dreadful anxiety.’ To the whisper of silk, he came close. His agile fingers loosened the knot and unwound the uncouth strip of rag.
Despite nausea, Sulfin Evend twisted his head and glared up at his looming nemesis. ‘I don’t fear death. You won’t hear me beg.’
Slight of bone, neat of movement, the Master of Shadow tossed the fouled cloth aside in distaste. Unfazed, he moved on, then released the rope that restrained the Lord Commander’s numbed ankles. ‘Shall we drop the predictable, boring exchange? The pain my caithdein suffered is past. The same for your uncle, dead at my hand. He might have been saved had he not been so quick to dismiss the goodwill of an adversary.’
As his wrists were freed also, Sulfin Evend discovered he needed an enemy’s help to sit up. Stiff from confinement, embarrassed by shame that thwarted all rational courtesy, he rubbed his gouged skin to restore circulation.
Scrambled wits forestalled even tact. He could not contain reckless bitterness. ‘Where was goodwill, when Lysaer s’Ilessid was tricked into burning his own troops in Daon Ramon?’
The mistake was immediate: mention of that name with hostile intent could not do other than trigger the curse of Desh-thiere.
Arithon froze. Eyes darkened, he transformed on a breath to a mindless predator coiled to spring. Too late for even foolhardy regret, Sulfin Evend stared at death, poised to rend him apart without conscience.
There, the savage moment suspended. The inflicted pattern that sparked deranged madness hammered into an initiate sorcerer’s singular will. The Master of Shadow shuddered. Griped as though body and spirit knew agony, he twisted and rammed his outflung hands against the jagged stonewall. Braced there, hard-breathing, he turned into himself with a focus no less ferociously frightening. His form appeared fleetingly wrapped in white starlight; or perhaps the unearthly effect was another offshoot of drug-birthed imagination.
Watching, transfixed, Sulfin Evend felt his hazed senses flung wide. Gooseflesh raked over him. As though he heard strains of intangible music, or pursued the cry of a thought hurled beyond reach of the mind, he gasped to a burst of wild ecstasy.
Ephemeral, sourceless, the emotion fled.
Arithon’s tension snapped all at once. He sustained a series of disciplined breaths. Then he blotted his face on his sleeve, shoved erect, and crossed to the far side of the fire-pot. There, he sat down with his quivering fingers laced on his drawn-up knees. As though no break had happened; no razor-edged conflict had danced at the abyss to drive him to geas-bent violence, he resumed the brutal interrogation.
‘Should I answer, for Daon Ramon?’ His cool regard assessed his adversary, alert, but without sign of rancour. ‘If you want to pick fights upon treacherous ground, I’ll walk away. The bully can’t punch with no victim to hand. For the dead on both sides, I have no stomach for mud-slinging, self-righteous argument.’
‘I have earned my demand,’ Sulfin Evend declared, shaken. ‘The curse-driven killer did not arrange the acts of piracy that happened at Riverton. Nor its cold-blooded aftermath. Of forty good men, I alone survived your run through the Korias grimward.’
‘The fox called to blame for the huntsman’s demise?’ Arithon laughed. ‘That is a bit specious, since after all, the whim of the Biedar arranged this encounter.’ Aware Sulfin Evend’s suspicious regard sought to measure him for concealed weapons, he stood up, then hooked off his sash. His loose robe fell open. The unclothed flesh beneath served his bitter assurance that he was unarmed. ‘My half-brother hates me because Desh-thiere wants us dead. Tell me, or better, examine yourself: what reason do you have to follow him?’
‘Should I answer?’ Sulfin Evend shot back.
Not large, though endowed with a neat, feline grace, the creature that four kingdoms raised arms to destroy resettled himself, stripped